Vladimir Bukovsky

Vladimir Bukovsky "is a Soviet dissident, author, and human rights activist who spent a total of twelve years in Soviet prisons, labor camps, and forced-treatment psychiatric hospitals. As a student, Mr. Bukovsky was expelled from his Moscow school for creating an unauthorized magazine. Subsequently he was forcibly interned in a psychiatric ward for organizing poetry meetings in the center of Moscow. On three more occasions he was arrested and imprisoned for organizing demonstrations defending other Soviet dissidents. After he managed to smuggle to the West documents detailing the Soviets' political use of psychiatric institutions, he was arrested and convicted for "slander of Soviet psychiatry." While in prison he co-authored A Manual on Psychiatry for Dissidents to help other dissidents fight psychiatric torture. In December 1976, Bukovsky was exchanged in Zurich for Chilean communist leader Louis Corvalan. He moved to England, where he published his bestselling autobiography, To Build a Castle: My Life As a Dissenter.

"In 1983, with Armando Valladares, he founded and was elected president of Resistance International, which fought for the freedom of political prisoners throughout the Communist bloc. In 1992, President Yeltsin’s government invited Bukovsky to serve as an expert witness at the trial conducted to determine whether the activity of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union was unconstitutional. The result of his testimony and research was the book Judgment in Moscow. In January 2004, with Garry Kasparov and others, he founded the Committee of 2008, an umbrella organization of the Russian democratic opposition that aims to ensure free and fair presidential elections in 2008. Bukovsky is also the author of Soviet Hypocrisy and Western Gullibility and To Choose Freedom." 


 * International council, Human Rights Foundation
 * International Advisory Council, Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation